Android 6.0 introduced helpful little tiles in the notifications panel that allowed users to access and toggle frequently used settings. Since the notifications panel can be accessed from inside any app, this makes those tiles very convenient to access. In Android 7.0, the same feature has been tweaked slightly so that you can access five of those tiles without having to drag the entire notifications panel down. Before, you had to open the panel all the way in order to access the tiles and it usually involved two swipe gestures; one to open the notifications panel and one to expand it. The quick settings are easier to access but there is only room for five tiles. Here's how you can change their order and have you preferred ones appear in quick settings.
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When you have multiple windows of an app open in Windows 10, you can get a small thumbnail preview of each one. To do so, simply position the mouse cursor over the app's taskbar icon. This is something we often do unconsciously without second thought. This works with all apps. You don't have to click the icon or anything. If you move your mouse cursor to one of the thumbnail previews, you can take a peak at the window in all its maximized glory. The feature is pretty neat and older versions of Windows easily let you turn it On or Off as per your need. The same cannot be said for Windows 10. You have no choice regarding the hover preview as it's always On. If you prefer to disable it, you have to make a change in the Windows Registry. The change will make it so that no thumbnail preview appears when you hover the mouse over the app icon. If you click the icon, however, you will get a thumbnail preview.
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Windows has long had a limit on how long a path it can support when it comes to running processes or accessing files. That limit is 260 characters. Any path that is longer than 260 characters needs to be trimmed down to be accessible. this involve moving files and folders around to shorten the path. With Windows 10 build 1607 and above, the limitation has now been lifted. You have to make a small tweak in the windows registry or the group policy editor to remove the limitation since it isn't removed by default. Here's what you need to do.
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Earlier this year an awesome app named Flux was developed for iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS. The app tinted your screen a warmer color so that the bright blue or white of the screen didn't keep you awake longer than necessary. It's also pretty great for when you have to look at your screen in low light. The app was exceptionally popular, so much so, that the feature it added was made a part of iOS. Android hasn't quite caught up with the feature just yet even though early betas of Android N featured a dark mode that didn't make it to the final stable build. There is however a neat little app called Night Mode Enabler that is built for Android 7.0 to give you the night shift feature. It even adds a toggle to the notification panel so you can turn it On/Off quickly. It doesn't let you customize the tint color or its intensity.
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Android supports a long list of languages that you can set as your input language. Up until Android 6.0 you could only set one input language at a time. If you ever needed to switch to typing in a different language, you had to edit your system wide preferences from the Settings app. This was obviously time consuming and Android 7.0 rectifies that. You can now enable multiple input languages. The new multiple language support can be prioritized so that the language you type in most often is presented as the default one in the keyboard layout. The secondary language is one you can switch to from inside the keyboard. Here's how to enable multiple input languages in Android 7.0 and set their preferential order.
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Not all messages you receive require well thought out lengthy replies. Often, the only reply you need to send in response to a message is a single word; Okay, Yes, Pizza. To have to stop what you're doing and switch to your preferred Messages app simply to send a one-worded response is both annoying and time consuming. At the very least, it interrupts your work flow. Android 7.0 has added a neat new quick reply feature that saves you the trouble of switching to your messages app to reply to a message. You can now pull down a new message notification and read and reply to a message from the notification panel. Here's how it works.
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Android 7.0 has introduced a neat multi-tasking feature called split-view that lets users pin two apps side by side. Users can easily switch between using the two apps. Anyone with a large screen is bound to love the feature but that's not the only new multi-tasking feature that Android 7.0 has introduced. There's a new shortcut that lets users switch to the previous app they were using from anywhere. The shortcut can be used from the home screen, the Google Now screen, the app drawer, and from inside any app. Here's how it works.

Android 7.0 has made considerable feature and UI changes to notifications. The notifications in Android 7.0 are now grouped together by the app they are from. This has removed the long list of notifications that just filled the notifications panel up. A quick reply feature has been added so that users can reply to messages and emails from a notification and priority levels have been introduced to keep unimportant notifications from interrupting you. Priority levels for notifications is an experimental feature and it appears to be working well. If you aren't too keen on using an experimental feature to manage notifications you can instead use silent notifications. Silent notifications are set on a per-app basis. A silent notification will make no sound, will not vibrate, and cannot be peaked into. Here's how to set an app to deliver silent notifications.
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Large HD screens have become a feature that phones and tablets alike compete on. Users factor in the pixel density and the physical size of a screen when they buy a device. A larger screen means you can view more content on it and a better display means everything looks better. Of course sharper displays mean the app icons and the text appear much smaller. Android 7.0 comes with a display size customization feature that lets you zoom in on your display. The feature essentially enlarges text and app icons making them easier to navigate. Here's how to customize the display size in Android 7.0.
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All notifications are not created equal and Android 7.0 lets you prioritize the visibility of a notification on a per-app basis. Power Notification Control is an experimental feature for now but you can easily enable it. Giving an app's notifications a lower or higher priority will determine how you receive notifications from the app. An app with very low priority levels will not show a notification in the status bar while an app with a high priority level will be able to show notifications even when Do not disturb is enabled or when you're using a different app in full screen mode. The point is to choose which apps can interrupt you when you're busy with certain tasks on your phone, and which ones can't. Here's how to enable it.
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For a long time now, Android has had a one-wallpaper-to-rule-them-all policy. This doesn't mean all Android users are forever stuck using the same wallpaper with no option to change it. Instead, it means the wallpaper you set for your home screen will also be set for your lock screen. On the surface of it, this looks like a pretty reasonable limitation. When you unlock your screen and transition to the home screen, the wallpaper not changing makes the transition look much smoother. If however, you want to set a different wallpaper for the home screen and the lock screen, you finally have the option to do so in Android 7.0. Here's how.
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Call blocking is a feature that older feature phones, and many smart phones have long supported. Call blocking has come and gone in various Android versions in the past. With Android 7.0, it's made a comeback and it is easily smarter than anything else in the smartphone market. Call blocking in Android 7 works globally i.e. a blocked number cannot call or text you over the regular phone/messaging app and it will also block all calls and messages from a number over any and all messaging apps you have installed on your device. Here's how to block a number in Android 7.0.
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Android 7 comes with a neat little split view that allows you to pin two apps side by side. The two apps that are pinned can be used simply by tapping them making multitasking on an Android device very easy. Tablet users might get more out of the feature since they have a larger screen to work with. The feature is awesome and Chrome is built to take even more advantage of it. You can pin any two Chrome tabs side by side and switch between them like they were two separate apps. Here's how.
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The first egg you hatch in Pokèmon Go will be a truly exciting point in the game for you. It's a milestone that you hit pretty early on. The mystery as to which Pokèmon you will hatch is there as is the hope that you might hatch something rare, depending on the type of egg you're hatching. My first egg hatch was a Magikarp and it helped me adjust to the disappointment that can come with hatching eggs. It's annoying hatching an egg that gives you a useless Pokèmon but it's even more annoying when you're in the middle of catching a Pokèmon and the 'Oh?' screen comes up. Your egg might hatch but the Pokèmon you're trying to catch might get away. Here's how you can skip it if it pops up at an untimely moment.
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Stranger Things is a hit Netflix series that is just one season in and possibly one of the best modern sci-fi shows you can watch. We're not going to give away any spoilers for the show if you're still watching the first season so it's safe to continue reading. There's a pretty awesome scene in Stranger Things episode 3 where a wall is painted with letters and Christmas lights are strung atop of them. The lights and letters are used to spell out a message one letter at a time. It's pretty awesome and Netflix has released a little web app that lets you create your very own letter wall message to share as a GIF.
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Android 7.0 comes with a pretty neat split view that lets you pin two apps side by side. Both apps remain active and you can switch between using the two. The split view works in both portrait and landscape mode. In portrait mode, the two apps you choose to pin appear stacked with one on top of the other. In landscape mode, they appear side by side as they would if you were on a desktop. One app acts as the default active app while the other is one in several active/recent apps that you can choose from. Here's how to use the split view in Android 7.0.
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Apps refresh constantly in the background. Not all apps need to periodically fetch fresh data but some of the most frequently used apps are active in the background. Facebook and your email app are two obvious examples that come to mind. Background refresh makes it so that content loads faster when you open an app but it can tax your data plan. If you're on the go and want to conserve data usage, Android 7.0 will let you restrict background data usage by apps. The feature comes in the form of a simple switch you can toggle on/off from the Notifications area. You can restrict apps from refreshing in the background and you can also white list the important ones. Here's how.
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Phones have long had an ICE feature back from when they were simple feature phones and not smart phones. As iOS and Android took over the smartphone market, the feature soon disappeared. In old feature phones, this was little more than a phone number that was to be called in case there was an emergency. With smartphones, an emergency contact sheet can be all the more useful. Apple officially included a Medical ID in iOS 8 that allowed anyone to access critical medical and contact information from a locked iOS device. With Android 7.0, Google has introduced Emergency Information; it's a new feature that lets you set emergency points of contact as well as enter basic medical information such as blood group, allergies, medication, and organ donor status, so that it can be accessed from the lock screen. Here's how to add the information and access it from the lock screen.
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Smartphones contain a lot of sensitive information. In addition to contact details, sensitive emails, addresses, and access to social media accounts, smartphones also contain credit card information. Services like Google Wallet mean your phone isn't just a communication device but also a means of getting into your bank account. Naturally, you'll want to lock it so that it's harder for anyone to access it should you lose the device or it gets stolen. In the event that you lose it and someone wants to return it to you, they won't know where to send the device. On Android phones, you can't ask Siri who a phone belongs to but if you're running Android 7.0, you can add a quick point of contact on your screen. The latest version comes with a feature to add a message to the lock screen. This could be your phone number, your home or office address, or your email.
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Cloud drives are great until they start syncing large files to the cloud or your desktop and consume all your bandwidth in the process. Very few cloud drives will let you choose the order in which to sync files, none let you specify a time when files should be synced since they prefer live syncing, and very few will let you limit how much bandwidth it can use when syncing files. Fortunately, OneDrive is one of the apps that let you limit its bandwidth usage. You can limit both the apps upload and download speed provided you're running build 17.3.6517.0809 or above of the app.
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About Addictivetips

AddictiveTips is a tech blog focused on helping users find simple solutions to their everyday problems. We review the best desktop, mobile and web apps and services out there, in addition to useful tips and guides for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Read more...